As Max Hollein returned to New York three years ago. Now he is helping steer The Met into the future by encouraging “a multicultural perspective that fosters multiple voices.”
Now that travel is back on the agenda, there is nothing that can compare to the joyous experience of visiting New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s. Especially now when its new Director has started to place his stamp on its future development.
Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looks west out of his office toward Central Park, he can see skylights above the European paintings, galleries. Some have recently been replaced, as part of an ongoing project that will total around $150 million.
That amount—for a change many people will never even notice, and that could build an entire museum in some parts of the world—gives a sense of the scale of the transformation currently happening at the Met, where the high-energy Hollein has been director since August 2018. “We are reconfiguring about a quarter of the museum,” he says.
This level of ambition requires major fundraising, and the museum’s single biggest coup, announced in November 2021, is a $125 million naming gift for the much-delayed renovation of the Met’s modern and contemporary wing, from long-time patrons Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, representing the largest capital gift in the museum’s history.
Although an architect hasn’t been chosen yet, the museum has decided on a couple of parameters for the project, which the museum says will cost $500 million. The works will no longer be organized chronologically, the way it’s typically been done since contemporary art became an official focus of the museum in 1967. The new spaces will also be much more open to views of adjacent Central Park than previously.
“The idea of building a modern and contemporary wing has been going on for 10 years,” says Tang, a retired financier who has been a museum trustee for almost three decades and has previously focused on donations to the institution for its Asian collections. The project was temporarily scrapped in 2017, in the wake of financial woes over the past decade that included multiple deficits, layoffs and the abrupt departure of the previous director, who was also the chief executive, Thomas Campbell. The challenges aren’t all in the past: The museum had to create a $100 million emergency fund in 2020, and it ended the 2021 fiscal year with a $7.6 million operating deficit.
“I don’t want to criticize other museums, but more often than not, the arts of Africa and Oceania are displayed in an environment that is dark, theatrical, dramatized.”
— Max Hollein
The Louvre may be bigger and the Getty richer, but in many ways the Met sets the standard for all museums. The 152-year-old institution can get seven million visitors in a non-pandemic year, and it owns more than 1.5 million objects and has a $4.3 billion endowment (which has shot up by around $1 billion in two years). When the museum closed for almost six months in 2020, it was the only time it had been shuttered for more than three days in over a century.
The many makeovers include a $70 million renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, by Kulapat Yantrasast and his architecture firm WHY, with Beyer Blinder Belle. The 40,000-square-foot space holds the collections of sub-Saharan African art, ancient American art and Oceanic art and will debut in 2024.
Hollein and his curators are keen to rethink the ways non-Western works are shown. “I don’t want to criticize other museums, but more often than not, the arts of Africa and Oceania are displayed in an environment that is dark, theatrical, dramatized.” Of Yantrasast’s plan, Hollein says, “It’s light-filled, it’s pristine, it has a completely modern aesthetic.” There will be a clear glass wall facing the park, and Yantrasast is planning to use wood, stone and metal with natural finishes to create what he called “a contemporary environment that’s respectful of the materials.”
Also on deck is a $40 million renovation of the galleries for ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot art, designed by the cutting-edge Boston firm NADAAA, that will provide an airier, open floor plan.
The willingness to make major changes has attracted donors who favor bold ideas, like Tang and Hsu-Tang, an archaeologist and art historian. In 2020, they got serious in talks about their gift with Hollein and Daniel H. Weiss, the museum’s president and chief executive and the man who leads fundraising. As Hsu-Tang puts it, “We’re determined to be part of the [museum’s] renaissance after Covid.”
Hollein has made a study of being museum director, leading the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “You need to juggle your options as long as possible until you see this window of opportunity,” he says. “You have to be a gambler and a player.”
The Austria-born Hollein, 52, has a skill set—honed in an early stint at the Guggenheim and in his previous directorships, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt—that dovetailed well with the patrons’ vision for the new spaces. Tang says, “His contemporary background is a tremendous strength for the project, combined with his viewpoint that we must broaden the definition of modern and contemporary.”
Weiss says that Hollein has the necessary oomph. “His energy is infectious, and other people want to be part of what he’s doing.”
Hollein came into the Met as an outsider, the first director in more than 60 years who hadn’t previously worked at the museum. “Stepping into the Met is politically fraught on lots of levels,” says Hollein’s mentor, Thomas Krens, the former director of the Guggenheim. “The job of museum director is to give confidence to a wide cohort of essential people, from curators to the museum’s guards to the major donors, and Max does that extremely well.”
“The Met is built on the philanthropy of so many,” acknowledges Hollein. But it can also be tricky, as evidenced in early December when the Met announced with the Sackler family that their name would be taken off of seven exhibition spaces, in response to the controversy over the family’s role as makers of the opioid OxyContin through their company, Purdue Pharma. This included the wing housing the well-known Temple of Dendur.
The museum’s division of leadership duties made that an issue negotiated by Weiss, who came to the museum in 2015. Hollein’s mission is programming, and it’s no accident that as he talks in his office, he is surrounded by four highly diverse works. Helen Frankenthaler’s Inner Edge (1966) and Jackson Pollock’s Number 7 (1952) both represent midcentury American achievements, but they are mixed with an ancient Egyptian stone head and an 11th-century Hindu figure in copper from India.
Hollein wants to foreground artists of color and non-Western traditions. “It’s really a multicultural perspective that fosters multiple voices,” Hollein says. Working with chief modern and contemporary curator Sheena Wagstaff and her team, he was behind the selection of Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu to fill the museum’s long-empty outdoor niches with caryatid sculptures that blend African motifs with striking contemporary forms.
“Stepping into the Met is politically fraught on lots of levels. The job of museum director is to give confidence to a wide cohort…and Max does that extremely well.”
— Thomas Krens
He also advocated for the selection of Kent Monkman, a Cree artist from Canada, to fill the museum’s famed entry area, the Great Hall, with two large narrative paintings. In the marquee space, Monkman depicted his supernatural, gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, wearing black Christian Louboutin pumps, and little else, in crowded faux-histories. One of them is meant to evoke, among other things, Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 famed painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, a painting that is in the Met’s permanent collection, but here the mostly nude Miss Chief replaces Washington astride the boat. “They’re gigantic history paintings suggesting a different history,” says Hollein of the commissions, now also part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Currently on show is a reinvention of the period room “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” which Hollein strongly supported. It asks: What if Seneca Village, the Black community that thrived in the early 19th century where Central Park is now, were still around? (The village was destroyed by New York City in the 1850s to create the park.) In the room, contemporary pieces such as a pair of fauteuils refashioned with purple grasses and brass beads and a ceramic plate featuring Stacey Abrams by potter Roberto Lugo share space with an 1850s saltbox and a 19th/20th-century Cameroonian stool decorated with cowrie shells.
Hollein also wants the 17 famously independent curatorial departments to work together. Abraham Thomas, brought on by Hollein in 2020 as a curator of modern architecture, decorative arts, and design, says this strategy was a vital part of his job interview. “Max said he wants to make sure every curator recruited on his watch has the ability and interest to work across departments,” Thomas says.
In 2020, Hollein initiated a series of small but significant exhibitions called Crossroads, which are staged where the paths through the museum transition from one specialty area to another. One of these shows on view now, Empires and Emporia, includes loans from five departments: Arms & Armor, Asian Art, the American Wing, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.
“One of the clear goals from the trustees was to foster more cross-departmental collaboration,” says Hollein, noting that it’s easier said than done. “I remember that my first-year people constantly said, ‘Max needs to talk to us more.’ And all that I did was talking.” He says: “If you learn too much and you listen too much, you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the history of this institution. At some point you almost suffocate; you’re not able to move forward. And so, finding that proper balance is a challenge.”
The museum’s 150th anniversary exhibition, Making the Met, 1870–2020, made the point that its founders saw the museum’s establishment as a way of using art to heal the post–Civil War nation.
“Max and I both embrace the idea of the Met being a universalist institution, which is not the same thing as encyclopaedic.”
— Daniel H. Weiss
“I think that the museum in our current time is one of the very few places where you can have a debate, a broader cultural discussion, in a sophisticated and nonconfrontational way,” Hollein says. It’s a sentiment seconded and even amplified by Weiss; the two-meet weekly and email every day.
“Max and I both embrace the idea of the Met being a universalist institution, which is not the same thing as encyclopaedic,” says Weiss. “A universalist institution seeks to find community in difference.” In other words, it’s not just a comprehensive catalogue of stuff but a place to discover the shared humanity in objects that may seem unrelated at first glance.
Hollein’s father, Hans Hollein, was a Pritzker Prize–winning architect based in Vienna. His buildings include the Vulcania museum in Saint-Ours, France, which sports a striking, cone-shaped structure meant to recall a volcano, and he was prominent enough that four works he designed ended up in the Met’s collection. “Most museum directors like to build, but the difference is that Max understands what building means,” says Weiss
Helene Hollein, Max’s mother, once worked as a fashion illustrator, and artists were fixtures in his childhood. He remembers at age 12 getting Andy Warhol to sign every page of a catalog. “Everything revolved around art,” Hollein says now. “That’s how I grew up.”
Hollein studied art history at the University of Vienna, and then got an M.B.A. at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. For his artistically minded parents, Hollein says jokingly, their reaction to this practical streak was, “What is happening with our son?” He likes to emphasize this part of his résumé, with its suggestion that he has the big picture in his sights. His sister, Lilli Hollein, is the director of Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts.
His five years at the Guggenheim working for Krens—whose 20-year directorship saw unprecedented expansion, in the form of museum-branded branches across the globe, and controversial shows like The Art of the Motorcycle—proved a formative crucible. At the time, the museum was working on extensions in places like Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi. As for why he hired Hollein, Krens recalls, “His mother asked me to.” That request, for an internship when Hollein was 18, didn’t pan out until he was 21; the future mentor then told Hollein he could have a real job when he finished his master’s degrees, and Krens was true to his word.
Hollein’s titles changed as he moved up, going from curatorial assistant to chief of staff and manager of European relations. Hollein says now, “I especially learned that you need to juggle your options as long as possible until you see this window of opportunity where everything falls into place. You have to be a gambler and a player.”
In the 1990s, Krens was practically running a school for future museum directors, with lieutenants like Michael Govan going on to run the Dia Art Foundation and then the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Julián Zugazagoitia now helming the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
The stint also turned Hollein into a New Yorker with roots in the city’s contemporary art world. He and his wife, Nina Hollein, a former architect who is now a fashion designer, lived in a one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. “A lot of the artists we knew back then are now top artists, and we’re still friends,” Hollein says, mentioning George Condo and Doug Aitken. “People always talk about the ’70s art scene being close-knit, but I feel the ’90s was like that.”
Now that they have three children of high school and college age, they live in a rented townhouse on the Upper East Side not far from the Met, an easy walk to work that he made a point of taking every day even when the museum was closed. Hollein is proud of being a local. He noted that he loved biking all over Manhattan. “It brought us closer to the city and to each other.”
Many of Nina’s designs for women, which she has made by herself during the pandemic, are commissions, and she focuses on sustainability and recycled materials. The couple maintain a small apartment in their hometown of Vienna (they recently went over the winter holidays) and have also preserved some of the city’s flavor in New York. “We’ve kept much of Austria,” Nina says, including food like tafelspitz and artworks by Austrians such as the sculptor Walter Pichler and the installation-maker Lois Weinberger.
By far Hollein’s longest job tenure was in Frankfurt, a 15-year stay that transformed the city’s museums. By the time he was done, he led not only the institution where he was initially hired, the contemporary-focused Schirn Kunsthalle, but also the Städel, which has a serious collection of older European art, and the Liebieghaus sculpture museum. Though they are still separate institutions, Hollein consolidated their leadership.
As Krens himself says admiringly, “He was able to convince the city fathers of the plan.” Hollein also expanded the Städel itself. “We added 50 percent more space to the museum with a major architectural project,” he says. “And I love that.”
His two-year tenure in San Francisco was too short to make such an impact, though Hollein says his time at the Fine Arts Museums was instructive especially when it came to managing community relations. He hadn’t planned to be a short-termer. “I would not have left if I would not have gotten the offer from the Met,” he says.
The many European job offers he had when he was at the Städel were not appealing because he had the sense that, he says, “Within the next 15 years nothing much can happen in those places. I’m more interested in this evolutionary transformation process.”
